"I care" is the slogan of CoP19 at Warsaw. With this symbol, Poland wants to tell the world that it cares for climate change. But the facts are otherwise. Next to the biggest climate conference, Poland is also hosting the biggest coal conference in Warsw. That’s symbolic of the position that Poland has taken in climate negotiations. But Poland is not the only problem. Every developed country is now going back on its past commitments.

President Obama yesterday gave the most important speech on climate change in his tenure so far. In the words of Al Gore, it was the best “by any president ever”. It is a different matter that all the big cable news operators in the US chose to ignore this speech.

In public perception the renewable energy sector is a do-good sector that promises environment-friendly and affordable energy. It is for this reason that this sector gets overwhelming support from all sections of society. Civil society organisations, including the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), have worked hard over the years to increase awareness about renewable energy and have pushed the government policy towards ambitious programmes.

The post-2012 emissions reduction commitments for Annex 1 countries under the Kyoto Protocol (KP) are presently going nowhere. Japan had fired the first salvo when in the opening plenary, it categorically stated its opposition to the second commitment period of KP. Now, countries like Australia, Canada, and some European nations have joined the chorus to disband KP.

I have reached Cancun few hours’ back to attend the 16th Conference of Parties (CoP-16) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and have been greeted with news that can only be characterised as bad or worse.

India is poised for a rapid economic growth - an 8 per cent GDP growth rate annually over the next two decades is now considered a settled matter. But there are major resource constraints to this growth story that economists talk about but have hardly taken into account in their growth projections.

The recent controversy on the IPCC report regarding Himalayan glaciers has been all over the media. Before dwelling on this matter further, it is important to recognize that it was a silly mistake on the part of the authors of the IPCC report (those who wrote and reviewed Chapter 10 of the Working Group II: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities), to pick up a non-peer reviewed paper and quote it as a definitive finding. Silly still, they quoted a definitive year – 2035 – for the vanishing of the entire Himalayan glaciers.